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A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
> I'm working on a Virtual Appliance that runs Squid, Tor, Polipo+Tor, ziproxy & ssh for
> use by people who don't quite know how to setup squid for themselves or want to sandbox
> it.
That's excellent, but don't expect enough people to use it to make any difference.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Godwin's Law in 2 minutes. Must be a record.
In an article about a TOTALITARIAN move by the GERMAN government? I'm surprised it took so long.
Indeed, Germany is famous for not valuing freedom like we do. Of course, the last time they "didn't value freedom like we do" well that didn't work out so well for us, or France, or Belgium, or England, or Poland....
I'm just saying...
I'm sure back in Weimar Germany, no one thought that censoring the ending of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a precursor to the Third Reich but that's the way things turned out...
Look, if I were a German citizen, I'd probably be extra-hyper-vigilant about authoritarian tendencies.. you know, what with two world wars and the lovely example of The Third Reich and later East Germany before me. But that's just me.
I'll say it's none of my business until they move into the Sudetenland, however.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
You're right, comparing today's Germany with Hitler's Germany just because they're censoring the Internet is totally over the top. I'm sure that German govt will not put anyone in concentration camps this time, so that's a good sign. /s
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Mark of the beast. Of course, The Beast *is* the government FYI.
Life is not for the lazy.
I happen to be a network tech at a Danish ISP and have been doing so for 10 years.
While we are required to log some stuff for minimum 1 year,
none has ever expressed any interest in DNS logs, ever.
The only authorities who can request any sort of information are Police and military, via a court order.
They can by court order just get the interface of interest mirrored, so why should a understaffed and overworked Police care about what DNS you use?
On that note, very few in the Danish government knows what DNS is.
Your tinfoil hat may to be too tight, me thinks?
O ok.. sure and you're the senior tech at this ISP and have top level clearance then right?
O and you have access to every room in the joint too I'm sure?
Please tell us what do you log for one year? We'd all love to know.
So no one has ever expressed any interest to you in DNS logs but then again who the hell are you?
Police and military... who the hell else where we talking about again?
So I also take it that the Police and/or government come to you with there high profile requests then?
How the hell do you know anything about what the people in the Danish government know? Are you a member of the Danish government or have you given them a pop-quiz?
Tinfoil hat.. o that's funny... sure I'm batshit crazy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/washington/09fbi.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy
Yup I'm the one out in LA LA land... but hey maybe you think that this all is just a US problem. That's cool, just don't call me names when I just pulled three articles out of my ass in 10 seconds and all you have is your goldleef-hat and a box of Kleenex...